Anvil Biosciences has five employees, no venture funding and no product. Until recently, it squeezed into a 1,800-square-foot incubator with three companies.

If Anvil were trying to make a photo-sharing app, it would need little besides a laptop and Wi-Fi. But as a biotechnology startup that is trying to create treatments for autoimmune diseases and cancer, Anvil needs, and lacks, millions of dollars' worth of scientific equipment just to test a feasible idea.

Last year, CEO Jack Lin stumbled on a solution a few doors down from his office, then in Menlo Park: Transcriptic, whose lab of automated robots can be programmed to perform biologic experiments.

Lin sent over genes he wanted cloned for use in future experiments, and in less than a week, the finished products came back. The price was $5,000 - half what it would have cost Anvil to buy its own equipment and pay staff to do the work, Lin estimates.

"We didn't need to build up a whole infrastructure and workflow for doing this," he said.

Life science research is moving toward an era of "virtual" laboratories that use technology to outsource manual labor, industry observers say. Services such as Transcriptic, Emerald Cloud Lab and the Science Exchange take care of experiments that are monotonous yet necessary, like moving around vials of liquid and growing cells. Researchers are then free, the thinking goes, to analyze results and consider big-picture conclusions.

Eventually, "biologic labs and computer labs will look the exact same - smart people with laptops," said Blake Byers of Google Ventures, one of the venture capital firms that have invested a total of $6 million in Transcriptic.

Pooling resources

Life science researchers are increasingly pooling resources in all kinds of ways. Boot-strapped scientists share space and equipment in incubators like the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences. Companies have long relied on outside groups, known as contract research organizations, to conduct experiments and clinical trials for them.

Now, a new wave of services wants to give researchers both greater independence from their experiments and greater control over how the projects are run. That could appeal to startups at a time when competition for venture capital is fierce.

Early-stage life science companies raised significantly more money in the first quarter of 2014 than the same period last year, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association.

But the life science sector accounted for just 17 percent of all funding in the first quarter of this year, compared with 32 percent at its peak in 2009. Venture capitalists are instead investing in software, which can promise faster returns. It also requires less capital than the life sciences. A next-generation genome-sequencing platform from Illumina is $740,000, for example, and a scanning electron microscope costs $250,000.

At Transcriptic, scientists can send in samples and, starting this month, electronically submit instructions for experiments that robots in Menlo Park then carry out. Such procedures include polymerase chain reactions, in which millions of copies of a specific piece of DNA are made. Prices range from $4.50 to analyze a mouse sample to $250 to clone and synthesize DNA.

Human error

Robots remove human error from the equation, said CEO Max Hodak, who founded Transcriptic in 2012. Users can remotely access their results and monitor the experiment in real time.

Transcriptic's closest rival is Emerald Therapeutics, also in Menlo Park and founded in 2010. In late June, the biotechnology company said robots that it built for its own experiments would soon be open to outside researchers.

The Emerald Cloud Laboratory, which will run a trial next year, can perform more than 40 standard experiments. Typical prices range from $5 to $25 per sample processed. Users will also be able to log in to get access to data and details about the status of the machines, the company says.

Co-founders Brian Frezza and D.J. Kleinbaum say they plan to leave their 5,000-square-foot lab, which holds $2.5 million worth of robotic equipment, for a new, 15,000-square-foot space.

Unlike a partnership with a contract research organization, in which a hired scientist conducts the work off-site, Emerald lets researchers track the work as the robots do it, said Brian Singerman, a partner at the Founders Fund, one of the venture capital firms that have invested a total of $13.5 million in Emerald.

"You have constant access to experiments, you can rerun experiments with the same exact parameters, and you should get the same results back," he said.

Not everyone is convinced that robots hold the answers. Such services could replace some valuable skill-learning time for beginning scientists, for example.

Online exchange

Scientists who lack equipment to run a certain experiment can turn to other scientists on the Science Exchange, a Palo Alto company that has raised $6 million. On that online marketplace, researchers can find and pay a lab somewhere in the world to do a project. More than 1,000 labs offer more than 2,000 types of experiments, said CEO Elizabeth Iorns.

Collaboration can be tricky when it comes to deciding who receives how much credit on scientific publications. Iorns said the payment factor reminds scientists they are part of a business transaction and should set boundaries for authors' credits from the get-go.

Robots are fast and accurate, but, Iorns noted, it's important not to underestimate what thousands of scientists can accomplish by pooling their brainpower and resources.

"You want the human at the start who helps you design your experiment, and helps you interpret results at the end," she said.